Vampire for Hire (22 page)

 
      
 
“Where in the back room did the theft occur?”

 
      
 
He pointed to one of the images on the screen. “There. The shipping and receiving room. We had just received the collection from the artist himself.”

 
      
 
“And does the artist know of the theft?”

 
      
 
“Not yet, as far as I’m aware.”

 
      
 
“When is the exhibit set to debut?”

 
      
 
“One week.”

 
      
 
“And the cameras caught nothing?”

 
      
 
“Not a thing.”

 
      
 
“Was anything else stolen?”

 
      
 
“Just the crystal egg.”

 
      
 
I knew the museum had insurance to cover such a loss, but there was no insurance to cover one’s reputation. From what I understood, the theft would be a black eye that the museum could ill afford.

 
      
 
I said, “Other than security guards, does anyone else work the night shift?”

 
      
 
“No, although sometimes the docents and museum staff put in late hours, especially when a new exhibit is about to open.”

 
      
 
“Were any of the museum staff working the night the sculpture was stolen?”

 
      
 
“Yes, but they had left hours before.”

 
      
 
“How many security guards typically work the night shift?”

 
      
 
“We have four working after hours. Ten when the museum is open. We only have three working tonight.”

 
      
 
“Why’s that?”

 
      
 
Now Eddie looked pissed. “No clue. Thad never showed.”

 
      
 
“What’s Thad’s full name?”

 
      
 
“Thad Perry.”

 
      
 
“Was Thad working on the night in question?”

 
      
 
“No.”

 
      
 
“Has he ever not shown up before?”

 
      
 
“Never.”

 
      
 
“So you would call this unusual behavior?”

 
      
 
“Extremely.”

 
      
 
“May I have a list of the names and numbers to all four security guards working that night?”

 
      
 
Eddie nodded once and slowly eased forward. He tapped a few keys at his keyboard, somehow avoiding knocking his coffee over in the process. This time. He wrote down four names and four phone numbers on a mini-sized pad of legal paper. He handed me the paper. His name was on the list.

 
      
 
“At the time of the theft, where were you?”

 
      
 
Eddie looked at me long and hard. I wasn’t getting a guilty hit from Eddie. But I was getting a hostile one. He said, “I was here, manning the desk.”

 
      
 
“The whole night?”

 
      
 
“Yes,” he said, “the whole night.”

 
      
 
“What about bathroom breaks?”

 
      
 
He jabbed a thumb behind him toward the small storage room. A storage room that, I saw, doubled as a small bathroom. “I take my potty breaks in there.”

 
      
 
“Who on this list is working tonight?”

 
      
 
“Just Joey.”

 
      
 
“I’d like to talk to Joey.”

 
      
 
“Of course.”

 
      
 
“Were any other private investigators hired to work the case?” I asked.

 
      
 
He nodded. “You and two other private dicks.”

 
      
 
He grinned and flicked his gaze toward my crotch. He enjoyed being crude in my presence. I wondered if he would enjoy being dropped into a Jacuzzi from a fourth story balcony.

 
      
 
Crudeness aside, it made sense to hire more than one detective. People did it all the time. When a customer found a human finger in a bowl of Wendy’s chili, Wendy’s hired over ten private eyes to break the case, which one of them finally did. The finger belonged to one of the customer’s friends, a finger he had lost in an industrial accident. The friends then cooked up a scheme, no pun intended, and it might have worked if not for the tenacity of one detective, and the foresight of Wendy’s to hire a slew of them.

 
      
 
“Has anyone made any headway?” I asked.

 
      
 
He flicked his gaze at me sideways. Cool as cool gets. “The egg is still missing if that answers your question.”

 
      
 
“Oh, most definitely. I’d like to see the back room now.”

 
      
 
He reached inside his desk and handed me a generic security badge. “It’s a temporary badge. Swipe it, then key in ‘0000’. And I’ll send Joey over, too.”

 
      
 
He showed me on the monitors where to find the back room. I thanked him for his time. Eddie nodded once.

 
      
 
Too cool to nod twice.

 
      
 
Chapter Thirty-three

 
      
 
I could almost feel Eddie watching me as I worked my way through the museum, past exhibits called Native American Art and Ancient Art of China. I wondered what my butt looked like on camera. Probably cute. Maybe a little bubbly, since my daughter called me bubble butt sometimes.

 
      
 
I made my way through the Spirits and Headhunters collections, stopping briefly to ogle at a half dozen shrunken heads.

 
      
 
Real, honest-to-God shrunken heads.

 
      
 
And they call me a monster.

 
      
 
I moved through another room, and entered the Mayan exhibit, complete with a stone sarcophagus and beautifully adorned
stelae
covered in hieroglyphs. The room was particularly alive with zigzagging light...and much bigger balls of light. I knew now what these bigger balls of light were.

 
      
 
Spirits.

 
      
 
The balls seemed to orient on me. Sometimes they grew bigger and sometimes smaller. Sometimes they hovered just above the floor or shot up to the far corners of the room. One or two of them followed behind me.

 
      
 
They were silent, almost curious.

 
      
 
But they could see me. I felt it. I sensed it. Eyes were on me. Unseen eyes. And it wasn’t Eddie ogling me from the Command Center.

 
      
 
And if the ghosts could see me, what else could they see?

 
      
 
Perhaps a crime?

 
      
 
I thought about that as I found the back door. I swiped the security card and entered the cryptic “0000” code and found myself in a spacious room. Spacious and dark.

 
      
 
I was about to flip on a light switch when one of the balls of light that had been following me slipped under the closed door and hovered before me.

 
      
 
I was standing off to the side of the door, partially facing a vast room with shelves and storage everywhere. I knew that most museums only displayed a small fraction of their exhibits, and that most pieces were in special storage within the museum, usually in basements. The Wharton, it appeared, didn’t have a basement, and allotted this vast room for storage.

 
      
 
The room was pitch black, but that didn’t stop me from seeing deep within it, and what I could see were various glass-walled bays that were probably temperature controlled. The bays contained what appeared to be rolling racks of paintings. No doubt very expensive paintings.

 
      
 
The ball of light crackled with energy. Yes, I could almost hear it now, a steady hum, too low for most people to hear. The hair on my arms was standing on end and I realized that the
the
ball of light was trying to draw energy from me.

 
      
 
So how much energy did an ice-cold vampire have?

 
      
 
I didn’t know, but the ball of light began taking on shape and as it did so, my mouth dropped open. And the more it took on shape, the more my mouth dropped open.

 
      
 
It seemed to pull in the surrounding particles of light, gathering them together the way cotton candy collects around a twirling stick.

 
      
 
The particles of light blended with the ball of light, which began to take on shape. A human shape. And when my mouth had dropped fully open, the vague figure of a tall, thin man stood fully before me.